Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Did you know that a wheel or a ball bearing does not need to be round? Convex regions that can roll smoothly come in many remarkable shapes and have practical applications in engineering and science. Moreover, the mathematics used to describe them, known as convex geometry, is a subject that beautifully ties together analysis and geometry. I'll bring some of these objects along and tell the class how to describe them effectively and recount their interesting history.

We are studying the asymptotic homotopical complexity of a sequence of billiard flows on the 2D unit torus T^2 with n
circular obstacles. We get asymptotic lower and upper bounds for the radial sizes of the homotopical rotation sets and,
accordingly, asymptotic lower and upper bounds for the sequence of topological entropies. The obtained bounds are rather
close to each other, so this way we are pretty well capturing the asymptotic homotopical complexity of such systems.

Note that the sequence of topological entropies grows at the order of log(n), whereas, in sharp contrast, the order of magnitude of the sequence of metric entropies is only log(n)/n.

Also, we prove the convexity of the admissible rotation set AR, and the fact that the rotation vectors obtained from
periodic admissible trajectories form a dense subset in AR.

Fictitious play is one of the simplest and most natural dynamics for two-player zero-sum games. Originally proposed by Brown in 1949, the fictitious play dynamic has each player simultaneously best-respond to the distribution of historical plays of their opponent. In 1951, Robinson showed that fictitious play converges to the Nash Equilibrium, albeit at an exponentially-slow rate, and in 1959, Karlin conjectured that the true convergence rate of fictitious play after k iterations is O(k^{-1/2}), a rate which is achieved by similar algorithms and is consistent with empirical observations. Somewhat surprisingly, Daskalakis and Pan disproved a version of this conjecture in 2014, showing that an exponentially-slow rate can occur, although their result relied on adversarial tie-breaking. In this talk, we show that Karlin’s conjecture holds if ties are broken lexicographically and the game matrix is diagonal. We also show a matching lower bound under this tie-breaking assumption. This is joint work with Jake Abernethy and Andre Wibisono.

A sequence A of positive integers is r-Ramsey complete if for every r-coloring of A, every sufficiently large integer can be written as a sum of the elements of a monochromatic subsequence. Burr and Erdos proposed several open problems in 1985 on how sparse can an r-Ramsey complete sequence be and which polynomial sequences are r-Ramsey complete. Erdos later offered cash prizes for two of these problems. We prove a result which solves the problems of Burr and Erdos on Ramsey complete sequences. The proof uses tools from probability, combinatorics, and number theory. 

Joint work with David Conlon.